COMPARISON OF LEARNING AND MEMORY OF EASTERN (APIS CERANA CERANA) AND WESTERN HONEY BEES (APIS MELLIFERA L.)

Honeybees are valuable pollinators strongly influencing ecosystem conservation, stability, genetic variation and ecological relationships in the floral diversity, plant community, evolution, and specialization. Honeybee is an excellent model organism for research on learning and memory among invertebrates. In their behavior, the subjective evaluation of a sucrose stimulus influences the behavioral performance. Here we report comparative behavioral data on the sensitization, habituation, short-term and long-term memory of Apis cerana and A. mellifera in China, using different sucrose concentrations. A. mellifera foragers have higher sucrose responsiveness than A. cerana foragers when tested using a proboscis extension response (PER) assay. Sensitization and habituation are well-known forms of non-associative learning. A. cerana took less number of habituation trials as compared to A. mellifera. Thus, these results significantly showed that A. cerana took less time to dishabituate. The sensitive stimuli of A. cerana against lemon extract were more than A. mellifera. In addition, although A. mellifera showed more sensitive stimuli against apple extract than A. cerana cerana, A. mellifera displayed significantly more learning and memory behavior than A. cerana after 2 and 24 hours.